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According to Radlov, the earliest inhabitants of Siberia were the Yeniseians[?], who spoke a language different from the Ural-Altaic; some few traces of them (Yeniseians, Sayan-Ostiaks, and Kottes) exist among the Sayan Mountains.
The Yeniseians were followed by the Ugro-Samoyedes, who also came originally from the high plateau and were compelled, probably during the great migration of the Huns in the 3rd century BC, to cross the Altai and Sayan ranges and to enter Siberia. To them must be assigned the very numerous remains dating from the Bronze Age which are scattered all over southern Siberia. Iron was unknown to them; but they excelled in bronze, silver and gold work. Their bronze ornaments and implements, often polished, evince considerable artistic taste; and their irrigated fields covered wide areas in the fertile tracts. On the whole, their civilisation stood much higher than that of their more recent successors.
Eight centuries later Turkic peoples such as Khagases and Uighurs, also compelled to migrate north-westwards from their former seats, subdued the Ugro-Samoyedes. These new invaders likewise left numerous traces of their stay, and two different periods may be easily distinguished in their remains. They were acquainted with iron, and learned from their subjects the art of bronze-casting, which they used for decorative purposes only, and to which they gave a still higher artistic stamp. Their pottery is much more perfect and more artistic than that of the Bronze period, and their ornaments are accounted among the finest of the collections at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.
This Turkic empire of the Khagases must have lasted until the 13th century, when the Mongols, under Jenghiz Khan, subdued them and destroyed their civilisation. A decided decline is shown by the graves which have been discovered, until the country reached the low level at which it was found by the Russians on their arrival towards the close of the 16th century.
Yermak drowned in the Irtysh in 1584 and his Cossacks abandoned Siberia. But new bands of hunters and adventurers poured every year into the country, and were supported by Moscow. To avoid conflicts with the denser populations of the south, they preferred to advance eastwards along higher latitudes; meanwhile Moscow erected forts and settled labourers around them to supply the garrisons[?] with food. Within eighty years the Russians had reached the Amur and the Pacific Ocean. This rapid conquest is accounted for by the circumstance that neither Tatars nor Turks were able to offer any serious resistance.
In the same year in which Khabarov explored the Amur (1648) the Cossack Dejnev, starting from the Kolyma River[?], sailed round the north-eastern extremity of Asia through the strait which was rediscovered and described eighty years later by Bering (1728). Cook in 1778, and after him, La Pérouse, settled definitively the broad features of the northern Pacific coast.
Although the Arctic Ocean had been reached as early as the first half of the 17th century, the exploration of its coasts by a series of expeditions under Ovtsyn, Minin, Pronchishev, Lasinius and Laptev - whose labours constitute a brilliant page in the annals of geographical discovery - was begun only in the 18th century (1735 - 1739).
The Trans-Siberian railway, constructed from 1891 - 1905, linked Siberia more closely into the rapidly-industrialising Ruissia of Nicholas II.
The Siberian branch of the Russian Geographical Society was founded at the same time at Irkutsk, and afterwards became a permanent centre for the exploration of Siberia; while the opening of the Amur and Sakhalin attracted Maack, Schmidt, Glehn, Radde and Schrenck, whose works on the flora, fauna and inhabitants of Siberia have become widely known.
Tsars from as early as the time of Peter the Great used Siberia as a place of exile and the site of forced labour camps, while simultaneously encouraging free settlers. With the coming of Soviet government to Siberia (after supplanting short-lived regional White Russian states in the region - see article on Kolchak) - these trends accelerated and expanded. The Gulag operated widely in Siberia, and the Soviet government increasingly saw the vast territory as a geopolitical continental heartland for settlement, for exploitation and as the site of re-located industry.
Original text from 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
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